1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of coin handling and specifically relates to a reusable container for storing and transporting a stack of coins. In a preferred embodiment the container is composed of a flexible plastic film.
2. The Prior Art
A coin container known in the prior art is composed of plastic and is made by an injection molding process. It has a hollow tubular structure permanently closed at one end. It has semi-rigid walls which, in association with the closed lower end prevent the coin container from being flattened. Such a coin container is shown in FIGS. 1 and 2. In contrast with the present invention, the walls and the closed end of the prior art coin container are thicker and considerably stiffer than the walls of the coin container of the present invention.
In the prior art coin container, portions of the cylindrical wall adjacent the open end are molded to produce toggle retainers that are used to prevent coins from falling out of the tube. The user pushes radially inwardly on the marginal sections to cause them to snap into the configuration shown in FIG. 2 by an over-center or toggle action. The sections remain in the configuration shown in FIG. 2 until the user snaps them back to the configuration of FIG. 1.
Although this semi-rigid prior art coin container has found limited use by collectors of numismatic coins, the container has found very little use in the much larger market for commercial coin containers such as are used by banks and stores for storing and transporting coins. These institutions rely mainly on disposable coin containers such as paper wrappers which are redundantly wrapped around the coin stack and which have wide end margins which are subsequently crimped. Other institutions use "shrink-wrap" plastic wrappings that are thermally compounded to shrink tightly about the coins when heated. Approximately 12 billion paper coin wrappers are used each year, along with a comparable number of the plastic wrappings. Americans currently dispose of 7300 tons of paper coin wrappers annually.
The present inventor was curious to understand why the attractive reusable plastic coin container shown in FIGS. 1 and 2 is not competitive with the disposable paper and plastic wrappings that are widely used. It was learned that the sturdy construction of the container of FIGS. 1 and 2 necessitates its being reusable a great many times because of the cost of the plastic of which it is composed and the cost of the injection molding process. However, because of its closed end and semi-rigid cylindrical wall, the container, when empty, could not be flattened for transportation and storage. This caused the cost of transporting and storing the empty containers to be excessive, thereby hampering the reuse that is necessary to justify the initial cost of the plastic.
Thus, the present inventor recognized that for a plastic coin container to be truly reusable, it must be capable of being flattened for convenience in shipping and storage when empty.